Lloyd’s of London targets emerging markets

Lloyd’s of London targets emerging markets

Lloyd's of London CEO Inga Beale said the specialist insurance market is “very interested” in providing insurance in some of the new emerging markets.

In an interview with the Nikkei Asian Review, Beale said that new emerging markets generated 43% of commercial insurance growth in the last three years.

Beale added that based on research, two-thirds of commercial insurance growth in the future could come from the emerging markets.

“There are forecasts that more global companies will be headquartered in some of these new markets, rather than in the Western world that we have been used to. That means a big shift of economic power to some of these new markets,” Beale told the Nikkei Asian Review.

“That is something that we then have to think about as a major global insurer,” she added. “How do we provide new products for these big global companies that are going to be sitting in countries where we haven’t necessarily been strong in the past?”

Lloyd’s was recently awarded a license to provide reinsurance services in India. Beale said the specialist insurance market will open its doors to the South Asian nation in 2017.

Beale said Lloyd’s has also applied for a license in Malaysia, while its growth in China, where there are 30 syndicates, has been doubling each year.

According to Beale, their platform in Singapore is the largest collection of Lloyd’s underwriters outside London. She said Lloyd’s has more than 20 syndicates, 200 underwriters and 400 workers in the city-state.

“We’re having to look at our existing business model which was very much ‘sit in London and that the business comes into London’,” Beale said.